Read Online Marking Time by Elizabeth Jane Howard - Free Book Online Page B

there would be, she
would spend the winter and beyond stuck in that damp, oaky little cottage in Wadhurst with Isla and Jamie. She loved Jamie, of course, but her sister-in-law bored her beyond belief. The alternative
was spending the winter – or, indeed, the whole
war
– in Scotland with Angus’s parents, who had never liked her and where she would be miles away from the slightest
chance of seeing Edward. Angus, who was as usual staying with them till he brought the other boys back down south for their prep school, had said that he was joining the army, which would keep
him
out of the way most of the time, but then Edward might be away too. He had already tried for the Navy and been turned down, but he’d get into something. She remembered feeling
like this last year, but last year there had been a wonderful reprieve; it was too much to hope that that would happen again. Edward was asleep. She turned to look at him. He lay, turned towards
her, his left arm thrown across her, his hand loosely clasping her right breast – his favourite, he called it. She had unfashionably large breasts, but he liked them: his lovemaking always
began there. His face, in repose, had a kind of simple nobility: his wide forehead with the widow’s peak that was just off centre; the rather large and beaky nose, whose nostrils were each
adorned by one silky, even more voluptuously curling hair, only visible if his head was thrown back; the faintly purple bloom below his cheekbones (he shaved twice a day if he was going out in the
evenings); and the chin with a faint cleft above which the neat and bristling moustache, kept as carefully clipped as a little hedge, barely concealed the long, narrow upper lip that contrasted so
oddly with the full lower one. One saw people who were asleep quite differently, she thought. It was the open eye that distracted one from being able to be sure what the person
was
. Now,
because they were soon to part, and the sex had been good – the best ever for him, he had said – and he lay, handsome and defenceless beside her, she felt a surge of love that was both
romantic and maternal. ‘Wake me up if I drop off,’ he had said earlier. ‘If we are
too
late getting off, I’ll be in hot water the other end.’ A boy’s
remark.
    She moved and touched his face. ‘Wake up, old boy,’ she said, ‘it’s getting late.’
    But later still, in the car going down, they quarrelled. By the time he had loaded the car, it was half past five, hours later than they had meant; he had opened the front door for her to get
in, and then said, ‘Good Lord! I’ve forgotten Villy’s jewellery,’ and gone back into the house. When he returned, he had been carrying a large Victorian jewel box. He got in
beside her, couldn’t find the car key and in order to feel in his pockets, shoved the box onto her lap carelessly. It was not locked and the contents spilled onto her skirt and the floor.
‘Dear me, how careless!’ he said, as he pushed the key into the ignition. For what seemed like hours, she retrieved pieces of jewellery, much of it in little battered leather boxes that
also opened since many of them had broken clasps. Silently she put garnet earrings, paste necklaces, brooches and an entire set of topazes and pearls back into their places – all
Villy’s stuff, that he had given her; not stuff that she wanted to see or even to know about at all. The box had a small Bramah key attached to its handle by a red ribbon. She untied this and
locked it, and then twisted round in her seat to put the box in the back. She was conscious of ungovernable envy and fear, and was unable to stop herself asking, ‘Which did you give her for
the last baby?’
    ‘The topazes,’ he answered shortly. Then, ‘Good Lord, Diana, what on earth made you ask that?’
    ‘I was curious.’
    ‘Well – don’t be. It has nothing to do with you. With us,’ he added in a more conciliating tone.
    ‘It has, rather, hasn’t it?